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Service Engineering - Methodology for 3G beyond 3G Service Development

Fast amortisation of investments is a key success factor for all industrial sectors. Distributors need to shift from selling products to providing services that add value to the customer's business processes. In particular the network operators have invested a lot for purchasing UMTS licences and to build up an infrastructure. There is no question that generating significant profit from innovative, value added services is essential in this context. Available and emerging technologies around 3G will deliver those services even to mobile users.
In order to gain acceptance in the market, those services need to meet a set of requirements. To be accepted by the user, such services need to be personalisable, network independent and must ensure security issues. Moreover, they need to support innovative features, such as mobility, device-independent usage, seamless handover, location as well as situation awareness, and they should adapt intelligently. From a providers perspective, easy integration of content and other services, scalability, robustness, and maintenance are key issues.
Value added services need to be developed, tested, deployed, and maintained in an efficient and effective manner. In order to support the whole development life-cycle process a comprehensive service engineering methodology is required which has to be supported by a corresponding Serviceware Framework. Service engineering has to cope with the requirements of the particular involved roles, being developers, providers, and users. Among the requirements are the definition, evaluation, and management of business models, usability issues, security, privacy, and barrier-free service access. These rather generic requirements will have specific characteristics in different application domains and will be complemented by further application-specific demands. Considering this diversity, it is therefore essential to think of a general service engineering scheme serving as a generic process engineering meta model and being supplemented by domain-specific service engineering methodologies that take the applications characteristics into account. The availability of a well-suited service engineering methodology will be crucial to the success of the future world of services.
This document will give a sketch, of how service engineering will look like in 2006, and what role each market actor will play in that process.